When staff at the Shepherds of Good Hope phoned a woman in Quebec out of the blue last spring, she assumed the worst — that her daughter, with whom she hadn’t spoken in years, was dead.
Instead, they asked her if she would take her daughter in.
The young woman, who had been sex trafficked and was trying to escape an abusive relationship, had shown up at the Ottawa shelter asking if there was
an extra bed
for her. Beni Rutimirwa, a program manager at the Shepherds who conducted her intake, asked a different question:
was there anywhere else
she could safely go? Within days, the Shepherds had her on a bus back to Quebec, and to her mother.
The case is just one of scores of encouraging outcomes to emerge from a recent six-month shelter diversion pilot at the Shepherds — a project built on a simple idea: intervene early and try to
keep people from entering a system
that often proves extremely difficult to get out of once they’re inside.
The pilot — a collaborative effort between the Shepherds, the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa and the city — challenged a central belief that for decades has prevailed at shelters: that anyone who shows up looking for a bed has already exhausted every other option.
“We assumed that if you were coming to shelter, it was your last choice,” says Michael Lethby, executive director of RAFT (the Niagara-based Resource Service for Youth), who helped set up the Shepherds’ program. “But that assumption has shown not to be true.”
In retrospect, it seems so obvious.
In many cases, Lethby says, people arrive at a shelter in crisis not because they have nowhere else to go, but because they believe it’s the safest or most appropriate place to turn in that moment. It’s how the system has been built — and marketed — for decades.
Shelter diversion doesn’t deny people help. It simply changes the nature of it. Rather than automatically admit someone who shows up seeking a bed, intake workers are trained to slow things down, assure people that they’re safe, listen to their story and have a conversation about where that person has recently been and whether there are safe alternatives that might keep them out of the shelter system altogether.
Often, those alternatives involve family or friends. Distance, Lethby says, can be a barrier. So, too, can pride or shame, or the belief that asking for help would mean admitting failure.
But keeping them out of the system, Lethby says, is critical. Once someone enters shelter, patterns form. Disconnection deepens. Street life becomes entrenched. And the longer a stay lasts, the harder it becomes to leave.
“I call it assuming a homeless identity,” Lethby says. “There’s a way of living that is homeless.
“Homelessness, fundamentally, is what happens when someone can’t leverage a social relationship for housing.”
Early on, however, even the staff running the program were skeptical.
“We weren’t convinced it would work,” says Rutimirwa, who heads the Shepherds’ diversion program. “The only programs we knew were youth programs. We only deal with adults, and we thought this would be impossible.”
What changed their minds was the program’s eventual success. The case involving the woman from Quebec was Rutimirwa’s first.
“When it worked, I thought, ‘Maybe this thing actually works.’”
The Shepherds’ pilot, meanwhile, didn’t involve hiring new staff, but simply trained existing intake workers, including all front-line ones, ensuring that diversion conversations could happen at all hours.
It’s difficult to argue with the results. According to figures released in early February, the program — which ran from April through September 2025 , successfully diverted 87 people — about 22 per cent of the nearly 400 people who sought shelter during the pilot. The rate was roughly double what was anticipated.
Diversion was considered successful if safe, alternative housing was identified within 48 hours and ultimately accessed. When alternatives were not found in those first two days, diversion case managers continued working with people for 30 days. It’s worth noting that if it took longer than two days to identify a safe option, it wasn’t counted as a successful diversion, but rather a successful exit. In other words, the success rate might even be higher.
The pilot kept people in crisis from long shelter stays — an average of 11 days for those diverted, compared to the typical stay of about 90 days. Two-thirds of those diverted did not return to the shelter system during the pilot or in the six weeks that followed.
There were financial implications as well. On average, each diversion saved about $6,500 in shelter costs. Shelter beds require round-the-clock staffing and infrastructure. Diversion, by contrast, typically involves trained staff time and modest supports, such as transportation. The cost of the pilot was just $15,000 from the city to provide training, and about $3,300 for transportation expenses.
Lethby says that the investments in the programs he oversees in Niagara, amounting to less than $200,000 for two diversion workers, have resulted in savings equivalent to three full shelters, and allowed a youth shelter in the area to be closed entirely.
Additionally, as an significant prong in the Housing First ideal, diversion helps ease the pressure to find more beds, and better serve those with more complex needs — the ones for whom shelter really is the last stop.
Rutimirwa’s initial skepticism, meanwhile, has completely disappeared. “Saying this is a good idea is an understatement,” he says. “I think it should be mandatory.”
It appears to be catching on. The Shepherds have continued with the program. Youth Services Bureau Ottawa launched its own shelter diversion program last June, and reports results similar to the Shepherds’ — a 21 per cent diversion rate, rising to 28 per cent for first-time shelter seekers. And of the 42 youths who were diverted, only two returned for support.
It’s clear from these pilots and Lethby’s experiences in Niagara that shelter diversion works.
The question now isn’t whether the city should expand the program — it should — but how long it wants to keep funding the current system that waits until people are inside before trying to get them out.
